


Arlington

by 19thjester



Series: Post Mirror Image [3]
Category: Quantum Leap
Genre: 9/11, Al is alive in most of this, Future, Gen, Subtextual Sam/Al
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-25
Updated: 2016-04-25
Packaged: 2018-06-04 13:23:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 10
Words: 17,724
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6659797
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/19thjester/pseuds/19thjester
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam goes to a funeral and realizes he has to correct a wrong in his own life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Funeral

The familiar crackle of blue light… then Sam Leaped.

Those days, over two years after leaving that bar in Cokesburg, he was never sure if he had Leaped into someone else’s body or as himself. As he nearly fell forward onto the green grass, wet with the spring rains, he caught himself and looked down. Good thing he hadn’t tripped, since he was in a black suit and tie over a white shirt with shiny black shoes.

Sam strained to think back to the briefing he had gotten, in that nothing space between Leaps. Al saw him less and less those days, so that mysterious briefing was often all he had to go on. All Sam remembered was being told that he would be attending a funeral in Section 60, whatever that meant.

As Sam walked forward, he caught sight of a huge white house, built like a Greek temple with six columns out front. He stopped to check a display nearby. It was holographic which told him that this was some time in the future, but he didn’t know how far.

The holographic display, blinking in its struggle with the surrounding spring drizzles of Northern Virginia, told Sam that this was the Lee Mansion, once belonging to Robert E. Lee before he left and soldiers from the Union took over the property, burying the first casualties of the Civil War in Lee’s backyard.

Sam looked around the area now, really looked. “Oh boy. I’m in Arlington National Cemetery.” Al had dragged him here a few times, years before, on one of their fund-schmoozing trips to DC. Sam remembered Al going to the section of the cemetery reserved for Vietnam veterans and spending an afternoon with some of his old Navy buddies.

He straightened his tie, and started walking. Soon, he saw a horse-drawn hearse plodding down one of the roads going through the cemetery. Sam picked up the pace alongside the driver and called out, “Excuse me, I’m supposed to be at a funeral today in Section 60. Are you going there?”

The driver called down, “Yes, this is the procession for Admiral Calavicci, who is being buried in Section 60. If you will please, go behind and follow with the rest.”

Had he really Leaped that far forward...? Sam was sure he had misheard, somehow. “Excuse me? Did you say Calavicci?”

“Yes. Now, please, join the procession.”

Sam numbly trailed back and joined the procession of people, which included naval officers and four vaguely familiar women dressed in black with their families. His plain black civilian suit stood out among all the decorated naval uniforms, but nobody paid him any mind. They continued the march down to Section 60 from the Lee mansion in the spring drizzle.

The hearse arrived, and a group of sailors picked up the casket and carried it over to the hole in the ground. As the group of naval officers shuffled around the grave and the families talked among themselves, the cannons were set up. Looking at the families, Sam finally recognized the four women that had looked vaguely familiar to him in the procession: they were Al’s daughters. They had probably set up the funeral.

Sam stood there, watching the ceremony with his hands folded behind him. What was he doing here? He wondered. It didn’t seem like he wasn’t here to right a wrong. Did this mean that he no longer would see Al while Leaping? 

The soldiers in charge, stone-faced Marines in dress blues, fired the cannons. Sam counted as they fired. Thirteen blasts. That would be fitting of Al’s two-star rank, wouldn’t it?

As the military band launched into “Taps,” Sam studied the families. He had memories of them from this timeline, but he didn’t actually know them too well. Ruth, Sharon and Maxine were all here with their families, but Polly was still alone.

The band wound down with their melancholy tune and quietly departed. After a time, so did the naval officers and Al’s family, as Sam was studying Al’s headstone. It had a cross above the inscription, which read:

ALBERT M CALAVICCI  
RADM  
US NAVY  
VIETNAM  
JUNE 15 1935  
APRIL 1 2025

“Oh Al,” Sam said to the headstone. “I’m sorry…” He trailed off. It had been thirty years since their project had started, hadn’t it? Surely it had been shut down long ago and Al had moved on with his life. The headstone stood next to a few other headstones, ones that Sam recognized as having belonged to buddies of Al’s, buddies who had died when a plane crashed into the Pentagon, over twenty years before. That had been a terrible day with terrible consequences, but it was untouchable.

“Excuse me,” a voice said from besides him. The voice belonged to Polly, a petite dark-haired young woman. “John, is that you? I hoped you and your mother would come today… But no, that can’t be, you look too old. But Uncle Sam is dead, so you can’t be him either…”

Dead? Sam had Leaped into the future before, but he hadn’t heard anything about his own death. His throat nearly closed before he regained his composure and mussed his bangs in an attempt to hide the white streak in his hair. “Uncle Sam? I’m sorry, I don’t think I’m related to you… Al was an old friend of mine.”

“Oh! Then you know about Dad’s friend, Sam Beckett, the physicist, right?”

“Um, yeah. I’ve been told I look like this Beckett a lot. It’s a shame he’s gone, isn’t it?”

“Dad always thought Uncle Sam was alive and out there somewhere. My apologies. My name is Polly. I don’t know how much he talked about me compared to his other daughters, but I’m Al’s youngest.” Sam thought he could see tears standing in her eyes. She quickly wiped at her eyes. “Anyway, what brings you here?”

“I’m Thomas,” Sam said, thinking of his brother. “Someone tipped me off that his funeral was today.” His eyes were still fixed on the headstone. “I lost contact with him a while ago. Did you arrange all of this?”

“I did. Dad said he wanted his remains at sea, but he was always too scared to write his will. When we discussed it, my sisters thought we should bury him in New Mexico. But I thought he deserved full military honors, after all that he’s been through, and it will give us a place to visit. And he’s closer to the Atlantic than the Pacific, so he’ll be more at rest here. We’re also planning on bringing Mom here at some point too...”

“Thank you.” Sam reached out to grasp her hands. “Truly… thank you for setting this up. He does deserve it.”

Polly fidgeted, then she looked up. “Do you want to grab some lunch, reminiscence about Dad? I know a great deli, somewhere that my dad loved, but it’s in northeast DC.”


	2. Memories

A Metro ride with one transfer later, Sam was following Polly from the NoMa station up Florida Avenue. In the blink of an eye, they went from a hip urban area to an area that looked more run-down. Sam looked around. “Are you sure this area is safe?”

Polly only laughed. “I know it doesn’t look that great. I promise you this place is good!”

They turned a corner, passing a run-down Subway that had seen better days, and walked up to a set of green doors with an Italian flag painted on them and a sign above the place proclaiming it to be “A. Litteri Deli.”. Polly pushed them open, and Sam followed. When Sam entered, his mouth dropped open. The shelves in the store were crammed with all kinds of Italian products, and some of the shelves on the back walls extended from the floor to the ceiling. As they went inside and past the refrigerated sections, Sam saw that one wall towards the back was entirely covered with pasta.

Polly showed Sam the order form. As they waited for their sandwiches to arrive, Polly told Sam, “This was one of Dad’s favorite places to eat in DC. He loved the eggplant parmesan sandwich here.”

Sam had seen the jarred sauces in the refrigerated section. “Did he get any of the other food here?”

“Sometimes. He said that their meatballs were really good, but that was before that girlfriend of his turned him off meat by…”

“...cutting his steak for him all the time,” Sam finished, and they both laughed. He remembered it had been a wife in a past timeline. Some things just stayed constant between timelines, didn’t they? Just then, the counterman called out that their sandwiches were done, and they picked them up.

After they picked up chips and bottles of soda and Polly paid for their lunches, Sam followed her out. She crossed the street to a nearby college campus mostly bordered by a black wrought-iron fence. Where the fence opened on the corner, a tall glass-walled building stood not far off. There was a patch of green grass in front of the building with a few benches, and here Sam and Polly sat with their lunches.

They sat in silence. Soon, a gray-haired squat woman with glasses approached them. She shook her index finger, pushed one hand towards Polly then pressed a thumb on a splayed hand to her forehead. Sam remembered a little sign language from past Leaps, so he knew that she was signing, “Where’s your father?”

Polly bit her lip, then her hands, held out in front of her, slid over in a flip from one side to the other. 

The woman’s face filled with compassion. Her fist moved in a circle over her chest, then she hugged Polly. Then she signed something else, something Sam didn’t entirely understand except for the sign for “friend.” Polly waved her off, her chin nearly wobbling.

“Who was that?”

“A friend of mine. I work at the high school on the campus and I met her around here.”

“Did she know your dad too?”

“She did. He was never too great with signs like we are and his hands couldn’t stand it either. But he was always sweet on her.”

“So you two sat here with your lunch from A. Litteri?”

Polly nodded. “It was hard for him to go far, and I worked near here, so it was okay.”

Sam looked around the campus, or at least, what he could see of it from where he was sitting. “The fence looks familiar, but is that glass building new?”

“Have you been here before?”

“Maybe. Or I heard of it somewhere.” Sam had Leaped back here in the eighties to help a student who was involved with a movement on the campus. “Didn’t they want a deaf president here a long time ago, or something?”

“Yes, they did! I don’t think they’ve had a hearing president since.”

“Al had a hard time going far.” Sam was thinking. He had a hard time imagining his friend, who couldn’t sit still, having a hard time with mobility.

“Ruth was always concerned about him near the end. She’s a nurse, like Mom was, so she always got on him about his health. He waved it off, but I could tell it was hard on him.”

“You said I looked like your Uncle Sam. What happened to him?”

“Uncle Sam vanished one day while working on his time travel experiment and he wasn’t seen again after about early 1998, I think.”

“Is that so?” Sam asked, trying to keep his cool.

“Dad said he tried to keep in touch with Sam all the way to the very end. Even after the government cut off funding, Dad managed to rig up a rough… what did he call it? Image chamber?”

Sam nearly wanted to say, “Imaging chamber,” but he reminded himself that he was deceased in this time and couldn't give himself away.

“An image chamber,” Polly went on. “He would spend hours and hours there, looking for Uncle Sam, he said. But then one day, maybe ten years ago, he stopped. His computer had finally worn out, he said, and Sam’s wife’d had him declared legally dead, anyway. Dad was never happy about that. And Mom had told him to let Sam go right before she died too, maybe twenty years ago?”

Sam thought of Beth in a previous timeline. “I’m sure he wasn’t. You said he had girlfriends?”

“Dad said his retirement plan was to cohabitate with someone rich.”

“Did that work?”

Polly half-laughed. “There was an actress, in Hollywood, that he was with for some time. But it ultimately didn’t work out. After his stroke, he came to live with me in Gaithersburg. I’m glad he’s at peace now, mostly.”

“Mostly?” Sam frowned.

“He always worried about Uncle Sam. I’m sorry, Thomas, but you really do look so much like him.”

“I get that a lot. How did he worry about your Uncle Sam?”

“Dad said it was difficult to find him since the computer couldn’t keep a lock on him, whatever that meant. Sometimes it took him a few days just to find him, wherever he had gone. The last time they talked, Dad said Uncle Sam didn’t seem happy with him. They had an argument, and Dad stormed off. Then he couldn’t find Uncle Sam again and soon after, had to dismantle the image chamber. Donna told him that John was asking too many questions.”

Sam sighed. “I’m sure that wherever his best friend is, he also misses your dad very much and wishes they hadn’t argued either.”

They talked for a while longer, reminiscing about their various memories with Al. Sam was careful not to add too many details in his stories that would point to who he really was, but he wished he could tell her. 

Then Polly said, “I must be going now. It was lovely to talk with you, Thomas. Do you live in the area?”

“No…” Sam paused to think. “I came here from California when I was told about the funeral.” Hadn’t he lived in California at some point? Or was that Al?

“All right then. Thank you for coming to the funeral. I’m sure my father would have appreciated it.”

Sam watched her leave, then he also got up. He wasn’t sure he wanted to leave this Leap yet, and he missed being in DC more than he had realized. There was a long afternoon stretching out in front of him, so perhaps he could take the Metro, find the shuttle to the Udvar-Hazy Center. Al had loved that place and would happily spend hours and hours there whenever they visited, talking about each plane’s specifications to Sam, whether or not he had flown it, and if he hadn’t, how much he wanted to fly it.

He started back towards the NoMa Metro station. The map he had seen there told him that there was a new line that he didn’t remember from his last trip here, one that would take him directly to where the shuttle to Udvar-Hazy was.

But as he walked up to the Metro station, a man appeared in a crackle of blue light.


	3. The Mission

“Hello, Sam,” the man said. His hair was short and white now, the white streak all but disappeared now, but he and Sam still shared the same intense dark eyebrows. “We need to talk.” His movements were slow but deliberate.

“Who are you? Are you a guardian angel too?” Sam asked. He had met other Leapers once in awhile, but they had called themselves guardian angels. 

“I’m you, but much, much older. You may call me Samuel.” Indeed, Samuel’s face had many more lines etched into it than the younger Sam’s did and his posture was more stooped over.

“That’s possible? For me to visit myself? But why?”

“At some point, you take the time to learn how to refine your Leaps. I needed to settle some things after many, many years and I need a relatively young man’s help with them. It’s about Admiral Albert Calavicci. Come on.”

Sam followed Samuel into a nearby cafe. He almost wanted to help the older man to their destination, but Samuel waved him off. 

They went inside, sat down, then the older Leaper said, “I had you come here because I regretted not going to Admiral Calavicci’s funeral. While I was settling my affairs, I realized I never attended his funeral nor had the chance to say goodbye to him. So I sent you.”

“Why me? When was the last time you talked to Al?”

“You’re still in good shape. And I wanted those who knew him to see me as they last remembered me. But not as many people came to his funeral as I realized. Even Donna and John didn’t show up. I’m disappointed in John… he was Calavicci’s godson after all.”

“Donna had us declared legally dead too. Did you realize that? And you still haven’t answered my question. He is my best friend- what happened so that my family wouldn’t go to his funeral?”

Samuel blinked, taken aback. “I thought she would have moved on after a time, but I didn’t realize she would go to that extent. I figured the government had us declared dead some time ago. And I’m sorry, Sam, but I can’t tell you how long it’s been.”

“Yes, she had to move on. Maybe I should talk to her, at least apologize for not coming home like I intended to. And cut out that crap! We’re no longer in Project Quantum Leap! What on earth happened between me and Al?” Sam was thinking now of what Polly had said about his and Al’s having an argument.

“It’s important that you make closure with Calavicci, for both his and Donna’s sakes. And I do not remember now, Sam. It has been too many years and I regret losing track of him. ”

Sam frowned. “For Donna’s sake too… I know what I have to do.”

“Sam, wait…!”

But it was too late. The younger Sam had already Leaped in a crackle of blue light.


	4. "I'm Home"

Sam found himself standing on a sidewalk in a suburban neighborhood. To the west of him, beyond the houses, he could see the top of a mountain far off in the background, nearly purple against the deep blue clear sky of summer. The mountain told him that he was somewhere near the Rocky Mountains. Judging by the cars he saw parked in this cul-de-sac, he was in the late 2000s or early 2010s. He was no longer in his funeral suit from Arlington. Instead, he was in a plain light green sports shirt over khaki slacks and beat-up moccasins.

He knew he was here to find Donna, so where would she be? Sam sat on the sidewalk as he considered his options. This era had very few payphones, so he didn’t have that available to him. He carried no cell phone, since they hadn’t been so widespread when he started Leaping. And even if he had a phone of some kind, he had no way to call her number. Sam dug through his memory, which wasn’t as swiss-cheesed as it had been in times past, and tried to dig up some kind of phone number for Donna.

“Mister? Are you okay?”

Sam looked up to see a boy, about eleven or twelve, squinting down at him with blue eyes, messy brown hair falling into his face.

“Yeah, I am. I’m looking for Donna Elesee. Do you know her?”

The boy’s eyebrows furrowed. “That’s my mom. Why are you looking for her?”

“I’m… a friend of her husband’s.” He wasn’t sure whether or not Donna’d had him declared dead by this point, or if she had remarried.

“She doesn’t like to talk about Dad.” The boy sat down next to Sam.

“Why not? What do you know about him?”

“He was a very smart guy, like me. Mom showed me his Nobel medal that he won for physics. We’re both really good at playing the piano. Mom is upset that he died before I was born. She said it was an experiment gone wrong.”

“You play piano, huh? Can I listen?”

“Sure.” They stood up, then the boy asked, “Wait, what’s your name?”

“I’m Sam, like your dad. Funny, right?”

“I’m John, like my grandpa.” They solemnly shook hands, then John led Sam inside. Sam’s old concert piano was sitting there in the living room, and father and son sat on the bench in front of it. John closed his eyes before he started playing a piece. It was complicated for someone of his age to play.

After he finished, Sam said, “Impressive. How long have you been taking lessons?”

“I started when I was four. Do you know how to play?”

“I played piano at Carnegie once, a long time ago.”

John’s eyes widened. “Wow! How did you get there?”

“Practice, practice, practice,” Sam quipped, remembering the old joke he used to tell Al. “Do you remember your dad’s friend Al?”

John nodded. “I like Uncle Al, but my mom doesn’t like him. She thinks he’s losing his mind.”

“Why is that?”

“Uncle Al thinks that my mom is wrong, that Dad is still alive out there somewhere.”

“What would you say, if you knew your dad was still alive?”

John focused on the piano. “I’d ask how he didn’t die and why he didn’t come home for so long.”

Sam glanced at the boy as John practiced a difficult piece. What was he going to say to Donna when she came home? Oh well, he would figure it out, as he always had on other Leaps.

John looked at Sam. “Do you know if he’s still alive somewhere, like what Uncle Al says?”

“Maybe he is, but I wouldn’t know for sure,” Sam told John. He wasn’t sure how long he would be here, but he didn’t want to give this boy any false hope either.

John plinked on the piano keys for a few notes, then he stopped. “Do you read Harry Potter?”

“What’s that?”

“It’s this series of books about this kid who’s a wizard. He grew up locked in a cupboard under the stairs, but then he got all those letters and went away to a school where he learned how to do magic! Come on, I’ll show you!”

John dragged Sam upstairs to his room, which was crammed with various mechanical and scientific experiments spread over the floor and dresser. Sitting on the bed, John excitedly told Sam all about the books. As far as Sam could figure, the main character, Harry, and his friends were sorted into different houses and the houses fought with each other using magic. John said that he and his mother would be sorted into Ravenclaw and Uncle Al would be sorted into Slytherin.

“But would both of you be Jedi or Sith?” Sam asked John.

“What’s that?”

“Your mom never showed you Star Wars?”

“No, she didn’t.”

Donna had never really gotten as into those movies as much as Sam had. “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, it is a period of civil war…”

Sam had nearly finished telling John the plot of A New Hope when the garage door rumbled downstairs. John jumped up. “Mom’s home now! You can go talk to her!”

Sam trailed behind John as the boy hurried downstairs. 

Donna, ten years older than the last time Sam had seen her but still as lovely as ever, was putting things away in the kitchen. “Mom!” John was saying as Sam arrived. “A friend of Dad’s is here! I talked to him today and he told me all about Star Wars!”

“A friend of Dad’s…?” Donna asked then she nearly gasped when she saw Sam.

“John,” Sam said. “Why don’t you go back upstairs, work on your experiments in your room? Your mom and I need to talk. In private.” His green eyes directed the boy upstairs.

After John had scurried off, Donna walked out to the backyard, with Sam following.

Outside, Sam said to her, “Donna… it’s me. I’m sorry I didn’t come home sooner.”

Donna studied him, then she pressed a hand to his arm. When it didn’t pass through, she said, “Good. You’re not a hologram.” Then she embraced Sam tightly, burying her face in his shoulder. Then she looked up at him, tears streaked on her cheeks. “Please don’t leave.”

Sam didn’t want to address that just yet. “What year is it? Where am I?”

“You’re not sure where you are?”

“I just Leaped here. And our son John neglected to tell me anything. Why didn’t you have Al tell me anything about my son?”

“You Leaped…? So you can’t stay?” She had his sleeve tightly held in one fist, as if she wanted to anchor him to this time. “And I’m sorry. I didn’t want to interfere with your Leaps. Besides, it got so much harder after he was born. You know how babies can be.”

Sam considered it. On one hand, he needed to be a father to John, to be a husband to Donna. But on the other hand, there was the much older version of himself who had spoken to him, showing that he couldn’t return home. Or was there a way to get out of it? If only he could talk to Al…! “I can stay for as long as I can.” He could give his family that much, couldn’t he? “But why did you tell our son that I was dead?”

“I thought I was doing the best thing for him. As soon as he was old enough and Al kept telling him stories about you, then he kept asking so much about you, where Daddy had gone, why Daddy wasn’t home yet. It was too much to try to tell him the truth. I thought about telling him that you were lost in your time travel experiment, but what if he decided to follow in your footsteps? I can’t lose my son like how I lost my husband.”

“...I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” Sam held his wife close. “I didn’t mean to do this to you.” Then he looked at her, raising his eyebrows. “So, when am I?”

She almost smiled. “It’s July 2010. You’re in Colorado Springs, Colorado.”

“What brought you here from New Mexico?” They were walking back inside now.

“After your body disappeared from the waiting room, the government decided to shut down the project. Only Al’s testimonies that he’s interacted with you are what’s keeping them from declaring you dead as well. I needed to find work, and the Air Force Academy needed a scientist under government contract. So I moved here when John was three. Al helped out with him after he was born and before I moved here.”

“Where’s Al now?”

“Retired, living out in California.”

Sam thought of Polly’s line about the Hollywood actress. “Bet you he won’t stay in California long.” They were in the kitchen now. He shot a glance upstairs before he said to Donna, “How will you tell John?”

She twisted one hand in the other. “I don’t know. But he’s a smart boy, like you.”

Sam walked to the doorway and looked up. Sure enough, John was sitting at the top of the stairs. “How long have you been there?”

“Long enough.” John came down to the landing. “Are you really my dad?”

“I am. I didn’t want to give you any false hope, but--” Before he knew it, John had rushed down the stairs and jumped onto his father in a hug.

Sam smiled as he hugged his son close. His thoughts strayed to when the next Leap would be, but he willed himself to focus on the moment. Then he let John go and said, “Let’s go out to dinner tonight, as a family.”

Donna said, “But what if people recognize you?”

“Then I’ll say that I get mistaken for the famous physicist a lot.” Sam said, thinking of “Thomas” from the previous Leap. “Come on, let’s go!”

* * *

Dinner went without a hitch. A few people gave Sam curious looks, but when one asked if he was the Sam Beckett, Sam gave an explanation to cover it up and the curious looks mostly went away.

Donna had her hand on top of Sam’s throughout dinner. “How long will you be here?” she whispered.

“I have no way to know,” Sam told her in a low voice. “I think I’ll be here for as long as I need to get my closure.”

“Closure?”

“I think I might be Leaping for as long as there are wrongs in this world. I know you were hoping for your Odysseus to come home, Penelope, and I’m sorry for that. At least you don’t have to worry about asking me to move our bed to prove who I am.”

John looked up. “Who’s Odysseus?”

“Read the Odyssey,” Sam told him. “I had to translate it for one of my degrees. No, wait, you need to read the Iliad first. Then read the Odyssey.”

Donna paid the bill for dinner, then they headed home. In the car, Donna asked Sam, “What will you do tomorrow?”

“I was thinking I could take John for the day, go do something. Do you have a phone number for Al?”

“Where would you take him? And I have his number saved somewhere at home. But you’d have to use my cell phone. People don’t use landlines here anymore.”

“That’s fine. And we’ll figure out something. I think we could go to Denver, maybe.”

“Good idea. There are a few museums there that he likes.”

After they arrived home, John went up to his room and Sam sat with Donna at the kitchen table as she dialed Al’s number on her cell phone. “Al? Are you there? Hi. I think I owe you an apology. Sam’s here, visiting, and he wanted to call you.”

Sam took the phone from her, which looked like an old and more rectangular version of the handlink Al had once used with a bigger and more colorful display, and held it to his ear. “Hi, Al.”

“Sammy! What are you doing there?”

“I’m here to right a wrong.” Sam glanced at Donna. “I’m here on a Leap to get some closure.”

“Are you coming home? I don’t think you can Leap home in this time… everything’s dismantled now.” Al’s voice was rougher now with regret.

“I’m not planning to Leap home right now.” Sam paused. To tell Al now or later? He remembered that Al had been upset about Donna declaring him dead. “I don’t know when I can. And I don’t know how long I’ll be staying here either.”

“I still have some favors I can swing, Sam. I could be on a jet tonight from LAX and say hello to you myself before long.”

Sam held the phone to his shoulder and said to Donna, “Al wants to come visit.”

“Will he bring a car with him? You never did say how you were going to get John to Denver.”

Sam picked up the phone again. “Will you bring a car, Al? I was thinking of spending the day with John tomorrow. You could tag along.”

“Where are you planning on taking him? If he insists on going to Casa Bonita again, forget it. That place is full of nozzles and their food is yeech!”

Sam laughed. “Donna said something about a museum.”

“Oh, he’s always liked the Nature and Science one.”

“Great. We can go. Be here by tomorrow morning, okay?” Sam handed the phone back to Donna, who said a goodbye to Al and something about seeing him, hung up then gave him a quizzical look. “What?”

“Do you not know how to use a touchscreen phone?”

Sam shrugged. “I don’t Leap this far into the future that often.” The previous Leap into Arlington had been the furthest he’d ever Leaped.

“Come on, let’s go to bed.”

* * *

Cuddling in bed, Sam asked Donna, “Why did you name our son John?”

“I thought it was appropriate to name him after your father. His name is John Thomas. Why not? What would you have preferred?”

“Why not John Albert?”

“Oh, after Al? That’s a sweet idea, but I thought it’d be enough to name him godfather-”

“No, as in after Einstein.”

Donna laughed at that. Sam held his wife and tried to live in the moment, not thinking about what lay ahead of him.


	5. Father-Son Bonding

Sam was awoken by the roaring of an engine. At first, he nearly thought he was back in the Leap where he’d had to fly an X-2, then he realized where he was. “Donna…? Are any of my other clothes still here?”

“I saved some,” she said. “I gave away a lot before I moved to Colorado. Let me find some.”

After she retrieved a worn out dark blue plaid sports shirt for him, he got dressed and hurried downstairs. Al was already sitting at the kitchen table, wearing a suit that was an eye-searing shade of orange over a lemon yellow shirt that had a silver atom-shaped pin on his lapel, and talking with his godson. John was in a gray and black striped T-shirt and brown shorts.

Al’s hair now had significantly more gray on the temples. A cigar, still in its wrapper, was on the table. Sam remembered Donna’s rules against smoking in her house from New Mexico.

“Thank you for letting Al in,” Sam said to John. 

Al got up--a little more slowly than before, Sam now noticed--and grabbed Sam in a bear hug.

After a few minutes, Sam said, “Al? Sorry, but I’d kind of like my lungs back right now.”

“Sorry.” Al let go, but he still leaned his arm on Sam. “It’s been far, far too long since the last time I did that. How have you been, Sammy? Still Leaping?”

“Still going on misadventures, my old friend,” Sam answered. “So what kind of car did you get? The engine startled me this morning.”

“Aah, hopefully you weren’t too busy…” Al gave Sam a lecherous smirk. “I have an Air Force buddy whose son works on cars. I asked if I could borrow one to take to Denver for the day and he lent me one of his more beat-up models.”

The three of them went outside to admire the car and Sam said, “Al, you consider this ‘beat up’?” The black car, a heavily modified Ford Mustang, shone in the morning sunlight.

“Yeah, the guy said it was fine to drive this one around. He’s got a few showroom cars that were even better than this one, but they couldn’t be driven anywhere. Pfft! What a nozzle. What’s the point in having a nice car if you can’t drive it?!”

They got into the car, Al found directions for the Denver Museum of Nature and Science on his GPS, and they went on their way, heading for I-25. Sam said to John, “What grade are you in now?”

“I’ll be going into eighth grade this fall. Mom said I could start homeschooling when I got into high school.”

“How do you like school?”

John shrugged. “It’s okay. I have a few friends, but I only know them through boxing classes and the few college classes I’m taking.”

“Boxing? You do that?”

“Uncle Al told me to. He didn’t want me to be a wimp.”

Al said, his ever-present cigar now clamped in his mouth, “Don’t look at me, Sam. I’m just making sure your boy toughens up!”

Sam glanced at the cigar in Al’s mouth, slightly concerned. “Won’t your buddy’s son get concerned about the smoke?”

Al showed Sam the cigar. “It’s not lit anyway. I’ll probably enjoy it when we get there.” He rolled his eyes and put it back in his mouth. “Buncha nozzles, setting up all of those laws against smoking.”

“At least we don’t have clouds of thick smoke everywhere anymore,” Sam retorted. “I don’t get how you can protest people tossing a Styrofoam cup into the road but not protest that!”

Al waved a hand, scoffing. “That’s not the same thing, Sam, and you know it.”

John said from the backseat, “Forget it, Dad. Mom tried that with him for a long time- it never worked.”

Sam sighed and laughed. “Some things never change, do they?”

John asked, “Dad, did you really time travel?”

“What, you didn’t hear enough of those stories from Al?”

“Mom wouldn’t let Uncle Al tell me any of those stories.”

“I did tell you a few, but you were too little to remember.” Al now said to Sam, “Donna got upset that he was asking too many questions about his dad.”

“So I heard…” Sam was watching the hills, deep green with summer, roll by outside of the passenger side window.

“Sam…? Where did you hear that?” Al squinted his eyes at him.

“Look at the road. And it was on a leap that’s past your time... Speaking of, how are your girls?”

“Oh, they’re fine. Maxine, no Sharon, finally divorced that yutz and she got to keep the kids. Speaking of, Maxine needs to leave her husband too.” Al shook his head, still keeping his eyes on the road. “And Polly just got a job in DC, at a school for the deaf. Sammy, where did you hear that?”

“I was at a funeral in Arlington National Cemetery on my last Leap,” Sam said carefully, hoping Al wouldn’t catch on. “I bumped into one of your girls and we got to talking about her dad. She brought it up about John asking too many questions about me.”

“Dad? Can I hear a story about time travel?”

Al scoffed. “God, I hope I’m never buried in Arlington. Too many horses’ asses there. I told my girls, if you need to bury me, burn me up then toss what’s left into the East River. But I won’t need to do that for a long time, so I’m not too worried.”

Sam turned to John. “Sorry about that. Well, there was the time I decided to jump into the accelerator and found out that I had to fly a plane to the speed of Mach 2, even though I knew nothing about flying. Luckily, Uncle Al was there to help out…”

He told John the rest of the story as they drove to Denver. After Al found parking, the three of them walked into the museum.

After getting admission, John dragged his dad and godfather to the top floor, where they looked at the Egypt exhibit. Al shuddered as they looked around. “Still reminds me of that Leap of yours, Sam.”

“Where I got to visit an actual tomb?” Sam grinned as he looked around. “There’s nothing here that can get you, Al…”

“Or is there…!” Al shrieked. Something had grabbed his arm from behind, and it turned out to be John.

“Take it easy on Uncle Al,” Sam scolded his son.

John pouted. “But it’s fun to mess with him! And he messes with me too!”

“Oh, he does? Fair enough.”

Al turned to glare at the Becketts, then they continued through the exhibit.

They looked at a few of the other exhibits on the top floor, including the dinosaurs, then they went downstairs to look at the taxidermied exhibits.

Al said to Sam, “The kid’s seen this place a thousand times before, and he always likes to point out the same thing every time. Just watch.”

Sure enough, John had gone to one end of an exhibit, where there was a diorama of wolves stalking across a snow-covered prairie. From the back, Sam thought the wolves looked fine, but John disagreed. “Look over here, Dad!”

“You coming, Al?” Sam said to Al, who had scooted to as near the exhibit’s exit as possible.

Al shook his head. “This whole place gives me the heebie-jeebies.”

Sam walked over to the other end, where John was pointing. From the back, the wolves looked almost majestic. From the front, the majesty lessened. Sam was trying to figure out what was throwing him off when John said, “The snouts are wonky. See?”

Sure enough, the wolves’ snouts did look off from this side. Sam smiled. “I’m sure they did the best they could.”

They continued through the exhibits, with Al trailing behind. 

But Al perked up when they got to the first floor and entered an exhibit called Space Odyssey. John told Sam, “I saved this for last. It’s Uncle Al’s favorite.”

Ahead of them, Al had wandered in to stare at the huge model of a globe that had projected images on it of NASA’s photos of Earth from space. John tugged at Al’s orange sleeve. “Remember? We need tickets for the planetarium!”

“Oh yeah, sure.” Al walked up to the desk set up near the planetarium entrance and paid for two tickets to something called Cosmic Journey, then he went back to staring at the globe.

When it was time for the show to start, Sam and John left the displays they’d been looking at and went into the planetarium. Sam remembered going to one in New Mexico (or was it California?) with Donna (or was it Al?). This show was incredible, showing them the wonders of the universe.

As the show ended, Sam asked John, “Did your mom show you the stars too? The real stars?”

John nodded. “I know where Orion’s belt is and she once took me to an observatory to see a lot more stars. I think it was for work, but I got to tag along.”

After they dragged Al away from the display on Mars and left Space Odyssey, Sam said, “Where can we go for lunch? I'm starving.” He pointed to the museum cafe.

Al shook his head. “No, we're going somewhere good. And I know just the place!”

He drove Sam and John through Denver down narrow streets until he found parking then he led them to a restaurant in a brick building with a neon sign out front.

“You seem to know this area well,” Sam commented as they went inside.

Al asked for a table for the three of them, then he shrugged. “I gotta see my godson, don't I? Donna doesn't mind either. And John needs to get out of that godforsaken city as much as he can.”

“What's wrong with Colorado Springs? It looked pretty when I was there.”

“That place has too many churches and it's home to a bunch of slackers.”

Sam had heard Al’s comments on the Air Force too many times, so he just smiled and sipped at his water. But John said, “Slackers? Who?”

“Son, I can land a jet on two hundred feet of runway. An Air Force pilot needs over a thousand feet.” 

Sam added, “And a Navy pilot can’t land an Air Force plane either, John- they wreck the landing gear.” 

Al only shook his head at this comment. Just then, the waitress came to their table and took their orders.

After she left, Al went on to say to John, “You know what happens every time the Air Force needs a new base? They spend their whole budget on a golf course. Then they call up Congress, ask for more money, saying they’ve got a hell of a runway but they need money for the base, y’see? So those nozzles from Congress fly in to inspect this runway, play a round on the real nice course they paid for, then they fork over more money to the Air Force.”

“Al, don't you have friends in the Air Force too?” Sam said.

“Yes, and they’ve let me play on their bases a time or two,” Al admitted.

Sam had a good laugh at that. “I forgot how great it can be, hearing you talk.”

Al elbowed Sam in the side. “And with you here, I can do this!”

Sam rubbed his side where Al had hit it. “I also miss seeing you. It seems like I don't see you a lot, lately.” Al’s face immediately turned grave at this and he fiddled with a cigar wrapper.

“How do you see Uncle Al?” John asked. “I thought you were in a different time?”

Sam, in a whisper, explained to his son about the Imaging Chamber. As he finished, their food arrived. Al immediately dug into his salad, ignoring Sam and John.

The three of them ate their lunch in a long silence. To break it, Sam said, “How do you search for me now? Since you don't have Gooshie anymore…”

“I set it up with Ziggy.” Al cocked an eyebrow at Sam. “Why are you so interested anyway?”

“I was thinking, that's all.” Sam still had Samuel on his mind. Whatever happened, he had to avoid becoming that husk of a man. “How long does it take you to look for me?”

“Before I cut the time down a lot by optimization, it’d take me a few months. Those days, my record is… two days, I think. By the time I got there, you were ready to leap out. I don’t go into the chamber anymore when I search. I have Ziggy search for you in time and try to lock onto your brain matter. What are you thinking, Sam?”

Sam smiled and leaned forward. “I just need my best friend for me through my leaps. And if I make it easier for you to find me, then that’ll be less time for you to spend worrying about me. So I have an idea, if you’ll hear me out.”

Al squinted. “What kind of idea?”

“A program on Ziggy to speed things up. But I’ll need to fly to California first to work with Ziggy… I’m sure she misses me too.”

“That she does, Sam. And yeah, sure, you can come by. I’ll fly you in and Jen is shooting a movie so she won’t be around much.” Al had his phone out now and was tapping at the screen. 

“Can we leave tomorrow morning?”

“That’s right, you need one more night to be mushy with Donna…” He rolled his eyes then slid his wallet to Sam. “Can you get the bill? I need to make a call.” He went outside with the phone.

John said to Sam, “Dad, can I come with you?”

“To California? I don’t know, since we’d have to run it by your mother.” 

“Please! You need to show me Star Wars.”

“We’ll talk about it with your mother.”

After paying up and being relieved that he still remembered how to copy Al’s signature after so long, Sam and John met Al outside, who was puffing away on one of his cigars.

“We might have a stowaway on our flight tomorrow, Al,” Sam said solemnly, hugging John close to him with one arm. He handed Al’s wallet back to him.

Al took the wallet, glanced down at John then back up at Sam. “Does Donna know?”

“Not yet, but we’re going to tell her. When will you be finished with that?”

“Soon.” Al eyed the car. “I’m not looking forward to driving down Colorado Boulevard, but it’s a necessary evil.”

Sam remembered the stop-go-stop-go traffic on Colorado Boulevard on the way in and how Al had drummed his fingers on the steering wheel at every red light. “Please don’t make me yell at you for running any more lights, Al.”

“If it’s yellow, I’m flooring it!”

“Think of John. You’re not setting a good example for him.”

John said, “Don’t worry, Dad, Mom sets a very good example for me with her driving. Can we go now?”

After Al had finally smoked his cigar down to a stub and disposed of it, the three of them got back into the car and headed back to Colorado Springs.

They arrived around mid-afternoon. Donna wasn’t home yet, so Sam asked John, “Where does your mom keep the movies?”

John showed him the cabinet and Sam started going through it. Al knelt next to him, leaning his arm on Sam’s shoulder, and said, “Do you need help?”

“No, I’m fine. Go make some microwave popcorn.” He almost thought about re-organizing the DVDs, but then he reconsidered, thinking of how much it might remind Donna of him. There were a lot of kids’ movies on Blu-Ray here, from John, and some DVDs that Sam recognized as being from his own collection. Digging into a far corner, he found A New Hope.

* * *

The popcorn bowl was empty and Al was dozing off on Sam’s shoulder, leaving Sam and John to watch the end of the movie as Donna came home. “I see your father has indoctrinated you already,” she said to John.

“We were talking about it yesterday,” Sam said. “Why not? And I’m surprised you still have some of my old DVDs.”

“I meant to show them to John.” Donna sat down next to Sam then looked over at Al. “Al? Time to wake up. The movie’s over now.”

Sam prodded Al, who jerked awake and rubbed at his eyes. “Sorry about that,” he mumbled.

John said, “Mom, can I go to California with Uncle Al and Dad? It’s just for a few days.”

Donna looked back and forth between her husband and Al, eyes narrowed and hands on her hips. “What are you two up to now?”

Sam took Donna’s hands in his own. “I know you don’t want me to leave, but I think it’s time. I told Al I wanted to take a look at Ziggy, write a program for her so that it’s easier to find me. Then I need to get back to work.”

“You said you would stay, Sam. And why does John have to go with you? I don’t want him getting involved in what you do!”

“I said I would stay for as long as I could. And Al needs me to work on this. Besides, I get to spend more time with my son if you let him go, and I thought you wanted that? It’s his choice if he gets involved too.”

“I need you too, Sam!”

Al, who had been fiddling with his sleeve, was uncharacteristically quiet during this whole conversation. Now he finally spoke up in a low voice. “Donna, it’ll only be a few days. If Sam hasn’t Leaped yet after he’s done, I can fly him and John back for you.”

This seemed to mollify Donna. “When do you plan to leave?”

“Tomorrow morning,” Sam said.


	6. Saying Goodbye

The next morning, as Sam was preparing to leave, Donna pulled him into a long embrace. Then she kissed him and brushed aside some of his hair.

“What is it?” Sam said. “I love you too.”

“That’s just it. You said that there’s no way you can come home. I know I wished you could stay, for my and John’s sakes… But if John gets to work with Al on the Imaging Chamber and work with you in the future, then he’ll get to know his father. That’s more than I could have hoped for, with someone like you who loves what he does as much as you do.”

Sam stared at Donna. “What are you saying…?”

“I think it’s time for me to let you go. I’ve waited over ten years already, and I spent four more before that, just waiting and hoping and only having Al’s word. How Beth was able to stand eight years of waiting, I have no idea.”

Sam searched her face. He opened his mouth, trying to find the words. Then he closed it, sighed and held her close. After letting her go, he said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize I would cause you this much heartbreak. Truly, why can’t I be the Odysseus to your Penelope and return home for good?”

“Not everything matches up to a story, Sam. As long as we’re talking about ancient Greek literature, what does that make Al? The Achilles to your Hector?”

Sam wanted to protest that really, it was the other way around, but how could he tell Donna about something that hadn’t happened yet and wouldn’t happen on this timeline if he could prevent it? “I don’t know. Al didn’t drag me into this since this was all my idea to begin with, anyway.”

“I’ll give your things to John, I suppose. That is, if he wants them. And I’ll start on declaring you dead.”

“Thanks. That’ll give me a good idea on what to avoid for future timelines.” He was avoiding being directly himself whenever he had one of those far-future Leaps, anyway. “I love you very much, Donna.”

“I love you too, Sam, but it’s time to move on.”

That was why Samuel had approached him in the first place, hadn’t it? Sam kissed her for the last time then went downstairs with the packed bag full of the clothes Donna had saved of his.

Al and John were having a cheerful argument. As far as Sam could tell, they were arguing about whether or not it would be legal to use spells from Harry Potter in a game of golf.

“--but that moment when the ball is on the edge of the cup,” Al was saying to John. “Wouldn’t it be better to use a pushing spell on the ball, just to shave a point off?”

John was shaking his head. “But you shouldn’t be using spells in a muggle sport! That’s cheating!”

“Al, you read those books too?” Sam said, squinting his eyes at Al.

Al shrugged. “They’re fun. And when your kids, grandkids and godson are all talking about them constantly for a decade straight, it’s hard not to get into them. Are you ready now, Sam?”

“I said my good-byes to Donna,” Sam said gruffly. “Let’s go.” He headed straight out the door, bag in hand, Al and John following after him.

They got into the car with Al driving them towards the airport in Colorado Springs. “I like the airport in Denver better,” Al told Sam. “This airport is pretty small as it is. But if I have to get down here quickly to see John, I’ll use this one. Our ride’s waiting for us there.”

After they arrived, they still had to go through security. For Sam, it was the first time on a Leap he’d entered an airport after 9/11, so it was shocking to see the amount of theater.

“I remember the first time I flew to Boston from Indianapolis,” he told his son. “It was for college. I was about sixteen, and my parents walked me to the gate. They couldn’t afford to come with me, but they could at least see me off. They couldn’t do that today.”

Al said, “I flew with Ruth to Annapolis when she got in and that was the year before you Leaped. I expect if I can’t be there for John, Donna will go with him. It’ll be okay, Sam.”

“I feel like I’m being herded,” Sam complained. “Why do people put up with this?”

“Did you see the news nine years ago, Sam?”

“I was there that day.” He remembered that Leap all too well, which had happened roughly a year’s worth of days for him before. “They wanted me to save a doctor who had never been heard from after that day. I tried to find her… I couldn’t, but at least I saved some others.” There had been a few other Leaps where he had visited New York and Washington and comforted others in the wake of the attacks, keeping them from taking drastic action. “I did what I could that day. And we still get this.”

“It’s to make sure we stay safe from any more terrorists, Dad,” John told Sam.

Al snorted, but when Sam caught his eye, Al shook his head, a gesture that said not to say anything in front of the kid who didn’t know better.

They got through security quickly and went down to the gate where Al’s friend with the ride, a small jet, was waiting.

As the jet rose into the air, Sam stared into the distance. He was still processing what Donna had said to him. After all that time and effort spent making sure that Donna would marry him, it was all gone just like that. He had accidentally given up on his family, his only family. Was it worth it? Sam glanced at John, who was sitting across the aisle. He hoped so.

Al came back from the cockpit, noticed the look on Sam’s face and said, “What are you thinking about, kid?”

“Donna was talking about the Odyssey, how I’m not really the Odysseus to her Penelope.”

“Yeah? What would she be to your Odysseus, then? Helen of Troy?”

“I think so, yeah. Remember, there was a time before her.”

“I remember only too well. So what would that make me?”

“I don’t know. Maybe you do fit Penelope better.” Sam was still hesitant to bring up Achilles. 

Al smiled at this, but it was a sad smile. “I suppose so. Spending all that time in those timelines waiting for you… then I had Beth again.”

“Did that work out okay?”

“For what time we had, it was sweet. But it was also bittersweet, having to lose her all over again.” Al looked out the window. “At least I got my girls. Now if only they’d stop making the mistakes I made in other timelines…!”

Sam dug into his bag and pulled out one of his old physics notebooks,from what Donna had saved of his things. After reviewing his old notes, he started jotting down possible programs to run by Ziggy in the peculiar programming language he’d designed for her, a mixture of physics equations and different programming languages.

Soon, he felt a weight on his shoulder and looked up out of the corner of his eye at Al, who was leaning on his shoulder.

“What do you got so far?”

“Just some ideas. I want to see what you have so far before I build on it with what I know.”

“Right, you’re the Leaper here, not me.” Al continued to watch as Sam jotted down notes. “Are you sure you’re calculating that set of ranges right? I have pretty narrow sets that I have Ziggy cycle through.”

“Hang on, cycle? What do you mean, cycle through?”

John had come over to look over Sam’s other shoulder. “Is that physics?”

Sam turned to look at John, Al still leaning on his shoulder. “Quantum physics. I think that would be covered in a Physics III college class for you. Do you know what Schroedinger’s cat is?”

“Either the cat in the box is alive or it’s dead,” John said.

“Right. For me, when my body was in the waiting room, before you were born, it was either I was in this timeline or I was in another timeline. Now I’m in other timelines and never in my current one.”

“Where would you be in your current one?” Al asked.

“I’m guessing 2001.”

Al chewed on the inside of his cheek. “Yeah… the project got shut down a year before that. No results to show and there was no sign of our director. Besides, what if they wanted to use our project to reverse what happened on 9/11?”

“That would be impossible to do.” Sam was flipping back through the notebook, looking at previous notes.

John asked, “How does Ziggy find you?”

“She works off of two sets of coordinates,” Al said. “There’s location, then there’s the date. Sam, I found that it’s easier to have Ziggy cycle through decades and try to find some trace of your mesons and neurons there before trying to zoom in on a date then a place. That’s what saved me months of looking.”

“By decade…” Sam wrote this down. “Any reason for that?”

“She got overwhelmed, I think, if I tried to look all at once. Right before he died, a year before where you are now, Gooshie suggested narrowing everything down because of how I found you after we lost your body.”

The pilot made an announcement that they would be landing soon. Al ruffled Sam’s hair before sitting back down in his seat.

After they arrived in LAX, Al led them to where he’d parked his car a few days before- a flashy bright red Lamborghini convertible.

“The beauty of having no alimony to pay now is,” Al told Sam with a smirk as the three of them got into the car. “I can trade in cars every other year instead of scraping by on one car for years.” As he drove, he one-handedly pulled out a cigar from the glove box, unwrapped it, clamped it in his mouth, clipped the tip and lit it. “Ahhh.... so much better. I missed that.”

“It makes the car stink,” John said from the backseat.

“Why must you take after your mother?” Al grumbled. To satisfy John, though, he blew the smoke out of the window.

Sam said to John, “Don’t worry about Al. After about twenty years, you’ll get used to it.”

They drove at a crawl through the highways around Los Angeles and into a gated community in Beverly Hills. Al flashed his license at the guard, who waved them in. He drove up a palm-tree-lined street to a white adobe house with a stuccoed orange roof.

“Like I said, Jen is out shooting a movie and she knows I have friends over once in a while,” Al said. “Make yourselves at home.”

The air-conditioned house was a relief after the California summer heat. Sam dropped his bag on the floor, picked up his physics notebook where he’d been making notes and asked, “Where’s Ziggy?”

“In the basement. Come on, you two.”

Downstairs, past a rec room, there was a door that led to an unfinished part of the basement. There was a smaller version of the Imaging Chamber here and a plain white desk with computer controls embedded into it. “Did you salvage all this?” Sam asked Al.

“From what I could, yeah. I also redesigned it, since this isn’t the nineties anymore.” Al picked up a new handlink, which was silver and looked like his own soldering work. “I had to make a new one too, after my old ones broke. Don’t get me started on how I had to jury-rig a system to charge the handlink too...”

John walked over to get a close look at the handlink while Sam looked at the Imaging Chamber and studied it, walking inside to get a good look. As far as he could tell, it was a smaller version of the one in New Mexico. “You don’t have an Acceleration Chamber?”

Al looked up from showing John the handlink. “Even the government wouldn’t let me keep that one, no matter how many strings I pulled. Sorry, Sammy.” 

Sam got out then looked at the control panel. There was a white CPU with Ziggy’s orb embedded in the middle of it, sticking out from both sides. “Hi Ziggy,” he said. “Long time no see.”

“Long time no see, Dr. Beckett,” the sultry female voice, which emanated from the box, said.

“Looks like you have smaller quarters now. Sorry about that.” Sam patted Ziggy’s housing.

Al’s head jerked up from the handlink and he waved his hands. “Sam! Don’t remind her--!”

But it was too late. The orb crackled more than usual and Ziggy’s sullen voice said, “Yes, and whose fault is that now? I must go reflect on how your actions have affected me. I estimate I will be done in fifteen hours, seventeen minutes and thirty-eight seconds. Goodbye for now.” The crackle of the orb died down to a minimum.

Al was holding his hand to his forehead, sighing and shaking his head. “Why’d you have to go and do that for, Sam?” He threw up both hands in exasperation.

Sam sighed. “I didn’t realize I had affected her that much. At least I’ll have more time to work on that program.”

Over the next few days, Sam camped out in the Observer’s room with his notebooks and a laptop computer lent to him by Al. He looked at Al’s two iterations of the search program to give him an idea of what would consume so much time and ran different sequences by Ziggy to find what cut down search time the most.

At a few points, John would come down just to watch Sam work. Sometimes Sam was too engrossed to notice his son, but sometimes Sam would look up and answer his son’s questions.

John asked during one of those times, “Why did you want to time travel, Dad?”

“There was this TV show on when I was a kid, younger than you are now. It was about this guy who traveled through time and I wanted to find a way to do that.” It was the simplest answer Sam had for his son.

John wouldn’t take just a simple answer. “Is that all? A TV show?”

“There was more to it than that.” The other timelines were harder to hold in Sam’s head now, but if he reached hard, he could find the memories from them. “There was a point where I was very unhappy. My brother and father had both been dead for over twenty years, the woman I loved had deserted me at the altar, and the government was about to pull funding for my project. So I did the only thing I could do. I Leaped.”

John considered Ziggy, then he looked back at his father. “But Uncle Tom is alive. He’s in Maryland right now. He isn’t dead.”

“And you’re here too. I changed my life for the better and I can’t even appreciate it now.” Sam finished typing the program and then sent it to Ziggy. 

John sat in silence for some time, watching Sam waiting for Ziggy to finish processing the program. Then he said, “Do you wish you hadn’t Leaped?”

Sam looked at him, startled. Then he looked back at Ziggy. “Ziggy, what are the odds John here would exist if I hadn’t Leaped?”

“Zero percent, Dr. Beckett.”

“What were the odds the project funds would have been cut off if I hadn’t Leaped?”

“51 percent.”

“How many people have I helped since I started Leaping, Ziggy?”

“About two thousand and thirty-six, Dr. Beckett, and that is a conservative estimate since I now no longer see your other Leaps.”

Sam turned back to John. “See? It’s not just about me bringing back Uncle Tom and your mother into my life. It’s also about me helping all of those people in other times and places. I want to make the world a better place.”

John accepted this. As Sam went back to work, John wandered back upstairs. 

Some time later, Al came downstairs. “Sam? Pizza’s here.”

“Hold on. This iteration is almost done compiling.”

Al sighed. “This is almost as bad as it was when we were both bachelors and working on the project. Ziggy, can you ping my watch when the iteration is done so that Dr. Beckett can check on the program?”

“Certainly, Admiral,” the sultry female voice said.

“Come on, Sam.”

Sam relented and let Al drag him upstairs. “John wanted you here,” he said. On the TV, the movie The Return of the Jedi was playing.

“What, no Empire Strikes Back?” Sam asked. 

John shook his head. “I watched it yesterday!”

The three of them settled down to watch the movie with pizza and pop. After the credits rolled, John went to bed, leaving Sam and Al on the couch.

Sam sighed. “I’ve tried, haven’t I?”

“Sammy, you didn’t see your kid before a few days ago. You did the best you could.”

“I should have been there when he was born. I should have changed his diapers, seen him take his first steps, taken him to his first day of school… I missed too much.”

Al rubbed Sam on the back and smiled at him. “Even when you’re there to see it, it seems like time goes by too fast with your kids. I still remember Ruth as a baby, but she’s all grown up now with babies of her own. Even with my youngest, Polly, I remember her babysitting John when he was just a baby and now she’s on the other side of the country.”

“I need my family. Mom… Katie… Tom… I want to call them, but I know they haven’t heard from me in years and years. Does John even know them that well?”

“Don’t worry, I made Donna keep in touch with them. Your brother knew about the project… You could call him.” 

“I couldn’t do that to Tom after all these years. It’s bad enough I have to be accountable to John and Donna...”

Al squinted at Sam. “Have you lost yourself?”

“No. You know who lost himself?”

“Sam, are you okay?” Al put an arm across Sam’s shoulders.

“Before I Leaped here, there was this older Leaper, so old I thought he was dying, but that can’t be, because all of the Leapers I’ve met are already dead. He said he regretted not going to his friend Albert’s funeral. This guy, Samuel, didn’t even realize his friend had died until later! What kind of friend was he?”

“Sam…?” Al’s face had paled and his arm dropped slightly.

“What kind of man am I? I leave my own family to help others. That boy should know his father, not being told by his mother that his father is dead!” Sam buried his face in his hands.

“Oh, Sam. Come here.” Sam crumpled onto Al’s shoulder as Al hugged him, then kissed his forehead. After Sam had finished sniffling and rubbed at his eyes, Al stroked his hair as he said, “You know who John’s got? John’s got me. I tried to be there as much as I could for him. My girls babysat him when he was a crazy toddler and Donna needed a break. He may not have had you, Sam, but he sure as hell had me.”

In spite of himself, Sam had to smile. “A crazy toddler?”

“When I talked to your mom about him, she said you were the same way. Running all over the place, hiding from anyone who needed to capture him, asking endless lists of questions, demanding to do this or that, breaking things and throwing screaming tantrums if you didn’t get your way. And all of this while talking like some elementary school kid and having your brains! Donna wanted to lock him in a padded room until he turned five. I talked her out of it.”

“I would have known what to do with him, I think.”

“Oh believe me, Sam, we tried everything. I think it stopped after he learned how to find information himself and didn’t have to ask so many questions.”

Sam sighed. “What if I leaped back in on the day John was born? What if I shut down the project and stayed at home, been a dad to John while Donna worked?”

Al considered this, chewing on the inside of his cheek a bit then shaking his head. “The only problem is, when John is barely three, you’ll have to deal with the aftereffects of 9/11.”

“What about 9/11? What does that have to do with me?”

“On September twelfth, 2001, I got a call.” Al paused. “I had already heard about a few buddies who happened to be in the Pentagon when the plane crashed in. One was in the hospital, so I thought they were calling me about him. Instead, I hear, ‘What can you tell me about Project Quantum Leap, Admiral Calavicci?’ And my retirement four years behind me!”

Sam’s eyes narrowed. “Why were they asking you about PQL? I thought they shut it down, a year after I was in that bar, you said…”

“They did. I told them they needed a high clearance to find out anything. They told me they had it but the information didn’t tell them where Dr. Beckett was. They needed him and his project. They said that they would reassemble it for us and give us another five years’ funding if we would jump through their hoops for them, do what they wanted.”

September twelfth. “Did they want the Accelerator back so that they could stop the attacks?”

“Yes. I don’t blame them, and we could have made bank off of it too…! Think about it, Sammy. If you’re able to control your leaps enough to come home in August of 1998, then you wouldn’t have an excuse when the government comes around asking for your help. You’d be a federal contractor, at their bidding, and John would know 9/11 as the event that took away his father, not as the event that causes long lines in airports.”

“Time is a fractured thing.” Sam was thoughtful now. “Either I come home, lose the ability to help others and keep my family or I continue to help others and lose my family, my best friend, who I am.”

“Samuel…” Al cleared his throat. “That man you met. His friend was named Albert. I don't believe in coincidences, especially when it comes to you.”

“What do you want to know, Al? I'm sorry I brought it up to begin with.”

“The funeral in Arlington… Was it nice, at least?”

“It was respectful. But something was missing.” Sam was deep in thought. “Al… In September of 2001, would I have the option of saying no?”

Al took out a cigar from its wrapper and held it in his teeth. “I don't know about that, Sam. You could be called a traitor for refusing to help America.”

“It would be the right thing to do.”

“Sam, what are you thinking?”

“I’ve been going on a lot more Leaps into the future, past 1999, since leaving that bar. I’ve seen a lot of people affected by 9/11 and how it’s changed our world.” Sam now thought of Samuel. “And what if I became hardened to it, lost who I was, because so many of the people I helped were all so unhappy and cynical?”

“Sam, don’t tell me you actually want to go back and reverse 9/11…!”

“I can’t. I was told that in a briefing I had after I finished two 9/11-related Leaps. They said that there are some events in history that are so profound that they’re untouchable. Both of the World Wars, for example. And 9/11 is another.”

“That can’t be.” Al had lit his cigar by now and he exhaled a cloud of smoke. “How the hell did 9/11 have that much impact on the world?”

“You won’t see it yet, but they don’t just go after America. They go after Europe too, and eventually, the rest of the world. This group of people is dangerous, Al. And I think they made 9/11 an untouchable event, because if we prevent it from happening, then another event of a similar magnitude will happen and it could be worse.”

“The government wouldn’t understand that. They would only have wanted you to try to stop what happened in New York and DC.”

“Then there would be more and more events. If I stop what happened in DC, then something else will happen in Chicago or Los Angeles. No, I couldn’t help the government if they requested that.”

“So what will you do, Sam?”

Sam looked at Al, his eyes clear and sure. “Another Leaper told me that if I ever got better at Leaping myself around, I could visit a library far in the future and look up people I wanted to help. I think I’ll work on getting myself there, then… when is John’s birthday?”

“August thirteenth. Sam, are you sure that you’ll be able to hold all of this information in your head after you Leap home?”

“I have a photographic memory and my memories aren’t swiss-cheesed anymore.” Except for when other timelines were involved, but Sam didn’t really count those. “I think I can remember it.”

“Do you remember Sammy Jo?”

“Yes. Donna still doesn’t know about her, right?”

“No, no. After the project shut down, Sammy Jo found work in DC. But when we were working on the project, she said she had an idea of how to bring you home.”

“See? I said I would remember Sammy Jo and I do. And how did she want to bring me home?”

“She said she had some ideas for improvements to the retrieval program.”

“All right. I have some ideas, Al.”

“Are you going to Leap soon?”

“I think so. I need to plan out some things first then I’ll try to Leap myself to a few places. What’s on your mind, Al?”

Al sat in thought, smoking the last of his cigar. Then he stubbed it out. “I want to say… I love you very much, Sam. I hope things will be better after you can come home.”

“Love you too, Al. I hope so too. Let John take my stuff, okay? Don’t worry about the program for now…”

Sam rose to go upstairs, but Al caught him by the back of his shirt. “Wait. C’mere.” He pulled Sam to him in a long embrace then kissed his cheek. Then Al looked at him, taking in what he could of Sam’s face. “What if this is the last time we see each other?”

“Then keep working on the program until it’s better. I left my notes down there with some ideas. Al, you don’t have to worry anymore because I’m coming home for good. Now let me go say good night to my son before I go.”

Al watched Sam walk down the hall to where John was sleeping and waited until Sam had gone in before he turned back to the living room. He couldn’t bear to watch Sam leave him, once again.

In the guest room, Sam carefully sat down on the bed next to his sleeping son, taking care not to disturb him. “Good night, John,” he said. “I’m sorry I have to go now, but I need to do things right for you, be there for you like my family was always there for me. I love you.” Sam kissed his son on the cheek. Then he went back out into the hall.

As he walked forward, he disappeared in a bright blue crackle of light.


	7. The Changes to Come

As he leaped, Sam had been keeping the mental image of a library in his head and a year- 2020. 

There was a brief nothing space between Leaps, and Sam now found himself face-to-face with his older self in that space. “What are you doing?” Samuel growled at him. “You had a mission to do for me and you didn’t follow through.”

Sam looked his older self in the eye. “I don’t like who you have become and I intend to change things for the better.”

“You intend to change? I’m still here so that means you won’t change anything.”

“I’m not done yet. After I am, you will be gone.” And with that, Sam Leaped into his next location.

He found himself in another person’s body, their thoughts a current under his own, standing in front of a set of stone steps flanked by lions. By going through his wallet and bag, Sam found that he was a history professor at New York University who was visiting the Public Library to do some research today. 

After entering the Reading Room, Sam presented his card then found a reference librarian. “Excuse me,” he told her. “I’m looking for information on the events of September eleventh, 2001.”

“That won’t go into any history books until next year, but I can find some contemporary books for you, Professor…?”

“Adams.” That was the name he’d found in the wallet: Michael Adams.

“Yes. What do you have in mind?”

“I’m writing an analysis on the terrorism groups who were involved that day and on other groups who participated in other attacks around the world.”

“Sit down. I’ll see what I can find.”

Soon after, while he sat at a table and assembled materials to make himself look busy with researching, the librarian brought him a small pile of books. “This is all we have,” she told him. “Perhaps it would be better to do this search after more scholarly works are available in a few years?”

A few years closer to Arlington, a few years closer to… “No, that’s fine. I can work with this.” After she left, Sam went through each of the books, taking his time on the pages he wanted to keep in his photographic memory. 

One of the books talked about Israel and a comparison of security measures for Israel, America and other countries worldwide. Sam took the most care to commit this to memory. He didn’t want the theater he had seen in the airport. He wanted awareness.

Another of the books talked about why some terrorism attacks had been successful and why some others had failed. Sam took note of the incident where people had stopped a terrorist who had hidden a bomb in his shoes and how they had secured him until landing. 

Having what he needed, Sam fumbled through Michael Adams’ papers until he found Adams’ subject of research, contemporary warfare, then requested some books from the librarian on that, sending back the books he’d used. After she left, Sam Leaped out, focusing on Stallion’s Gate in mid-1998.

Since he was choosing those Leaps now out of his own free will, there was nobody to brief or confront him in the space between Leaps. Sam continued on to Stallion’s Gate.

When he landed, he found himself sitting in Al’s office. Beth was leaning seductively against one side of the doorway. “Hi, Al,” she said. “Are you ready for your one o’clock appointment?”

A quick glance down at himself told him that he was in a shiny teal suit with scaled metallic sleeves. “Sorry, Beth, not right now.” Sam glanced down at his desk, which was covered with papers. “Can we put a rain check on that appointment? I need to meet with Dr. Fuller about that retrieval program that she’s been working on.”

“Retrieval program? Isn’t that the Programming Team’s duty?”

“Yes, and they need my input.”

“All right, we can get a rain check for that… Just tell me whenever you’re ready between Leaps.”

“Oh boy,” Sam sighed. When Beth was out of sight, he headed for the Programming Department.

As he went inside, the sounds of typing slowed and he felt more eyes watching him from beyond the cubicle walls. Gooshie said, “How can I help you, Admiral?”

“I need to talk with Dr. Fuller,” Sam told him. “It’s about that retrieval program she’s been working on.”

“Certainly. This way…”

The sounds of typing picked up again, tentatively, as Sam walked through the office. Gooshie said, “Dr. Fuller? Admiral Calavicci is here to talk to you about the retrieval program.”

Dr. Fuller looked up from the computer terminal. “What is it, Al?”

Obviously she knew him well enough to be on first-name terms. “I wanted to talk to you about that retrieval program you’ve been working on, Sammy Jo.”

“Sure. Have a seat.” She indicated the empty chair in her cubicle.

“What kind of progress have you made on it so far?”

“I’ve been tweaking the program and going over it to see what kinds of errors there could be that prevented us from being able to retrieve Dr. Beckett before.”

“Can you show me what you have so far?”

Sammy Jo brought up the program on her computer terminal. Sam read through it, noting the physics equations for his body, the past’s time and place and the present day’s time and place woven into the program. 

Sammy Jo shook her head at the program. “I don’t understand it… I think I’ve got it capable enough to pull Dr. Beckett home. But every time, it fails.”

Sam studied the program. “When do you try to execute this?”

“Whenever Dr. Beckett is on a Leap.”

“Have you ever tried executing it between Leaps?”

Sammy Jo pointed to the equation that would tell Ziggy where to pull the Leaper from. “But how? Dr. Beckett isn’t in a place and we need some numbers to plug into this.”

“Set everything in that equation to 0.”

“Zero? But that would cause errors and possibly cause Ziggy to malfunction.”

“That’s because you haven’t tried this between Leaps. We’ll run a test for this a month from today. The date is…?”

“It’s July sixth.”

“Okay. We’ll tweak this and get ready to execute this program on August sixth. Can you please send that to me? I want to suggest some changes.”

“I will do that.” 

“Thank you, Sammy Jo.” Sam left her cubicle and went back to his office. He locked the door then checked Al’s email for the retrieval program in progress.

When it showed up in his email, Sam opened the program in an editor and took a look at the code. Everything here looked good, much more streamlined than the original program. Sam wrote an email from Al to Sammy Jo to set the numbers in the equation for the past retrieval to 0. Then he found a sticky note somewhere in Al’s desk and wrote a reminder to Al, “Run Retrieval Program Test - August 6.” 

Sam unlocked the door then sat back in Al’s chair. He ran over his photographic memories of the information from the New York Public Library to make sure that he still remembered. Then he focused on August sixth of 1998, Stallion’s Gate, New Mexico.

He disappeared again in a crackle of blue light.


	8. Retrieval

Sam landed and found himself in the sterile white Waiting Room, wearing the Fermi suit he had originally Leaped out of in. He raised his arms in victory. Hopefully the date was right…!

The door to the Waiting Room slowly slid open, and Al walked in, all business in a bright red suit. “Hello,” he said. “My name is Al. Don’t worry, you’re safe. I just need to know your name.”

“Al!” Sam shouted. “I’m home!” He grabbed Al in a bear hug that nearly lifted him off of the ground.

Al staggered back. “What…? But this wasn’t supposed to happen.”

“What day is it, Al?”

“It’s August seventh, 1998.”

Sam’s shoulders sank. A day late…

“Ziggy said the retrieval yesterday was a failure. I’m just happy the program didn’t blow her circuits to the moon and back. Who’s the nozzle that thought it was a bright idea to set the numbers in that past-location equation to zero, anyway?”

Sam had to grin widely. “I am, Al. It’s a long story as to why… Now can we go get myself checked out? And where’s Donna?”

Al shifted from one foot to the other. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about this sooner, Sam, but she didn’t want me to tell you at all.”

“What is it?”

“She’s not here, Sam. She’s, ah, away on maternity leave. I guess you must’ve knocked her up the last time you were here, huh?”

“Where is she now?”

“She’s at home. No, Sam, the kid isn’t here yet. She wanted to take a month off before he was born, get some R&R time, she said… Hold your horses!” Sam was already heading towards the open door. Al accompanied Sam outside. The guards moved to stop him, but Al said, “This is Dr. Beckett and I have confirmed that it is. Let us through.” He marched Sam to where Verbena Beeks had been waiting, presumably to check on whoever had Leaped in.

“Hi, Verbena,” Sam said. “It’s me. The retrieval was a success after all.”

* * *

What followed was a long day of testing. Sam wondered if they’d be able to catch on that he was three years older than he was supposed to be during the physical testing, but the doctors didn’t remark on that.

After the physical tests came a battery of psychological tests, then he was free to go, with a change of clothes retrieved from his office, left over from the last time he had Leaped home. Al said, “Sam, do you need a ride home? Your car’s been in your garage since 1995 and I don’t think Donna would be quite up to the task.”

“That’d be great,” Sam said. “Anything to get me out of here.”

As they drove into Stallion Springs, Al said, “How are you feeling?”

“Pretty good. I think it’s time to shut down the whole project. I Leaped out, and now I’ve Leaped back in with some difficulty. We can write up some results, publish them in some physics journals then I want a long break.”

“But Sam! The government spent a cool few billion on us. What are you going to tell them?”

“That time travel is very difficult.” Sam watched the New Mexico desert speed by out of his passenger-side window.

Al squinted his eyes. “You’ve been acting hinky ever since you got back, Sam. What’s going on?”

“I didn’t just travel to the past, Al. I also traveled some to the future. And I’m telling you right now, in three years, things everywhere are going to change. And it won’t be good. I came home because my family needed me and I could only do so much past 2001.”

“So if everything is going to change in 2001, then why didn’t you change it in that time?”

Sam sighed, remembering that he was talking to a 1998 Al, not the 2010 Al he had talked to before. “I can’t. Trust me, I can’t. But I know what I can do here in the present.”

They pulled up to Donna’s house and Al walked ahead of Sam. “Let me break the news to her,” Al said. 

Sam trailed behind as Al knocked on the door. When Donna answered, Al told her, “I have some news for you. Your husband is home now.”

From behind Al, Sam appeared. “Hi, Donna. I told you I’d come home, didn’t I?”

“Sam…? Oh my God, Sam! Is it really you?” 

As they hugged, Al waved goodbye and said gruffly, “I’ll leave you to it now. Planning on coming in tomorrow?”

“I don’t think so, but it’s going to be my birthday, isn’t it?” Sam said. “I’ll call.”

“Happy birthday! And see ya then.” And with that, Al drove off.

* * *

Donna and Sam caught up on what had happened. Donna told Sam that it was going to be a boy, due at the beginning of September, but Sam knew better.

“What are you going to do now?”

“I’m going to initiate the procedures for shutting down the project. Then I want to write up my results and publish them. After that, I need a long vacation.”

“With us.”

“Yes, with the two of you. I’ve been leaping for years… I deserve a break.”

He took his birthday off to be with Donna. But it was she who encouraged him to go back to work the day after that. “He’s not coming for a while yet, and you need to get going on closing everything up.”

When Sam entered the Project Quantum Leap facility, all of the staff greeted him. Al slapped a hand on his back. “It’s great to have you back, Sam.”

Sam looked around and smiled. “As long as you’re all here, I’d like to make an announcement. First of all, thank you for your services. You’ve all done a wonderful job. But now that I’ve managed to Leap out and less successfully managed to Leap back in, I think it’s time to bring this project to an end soon. We will be initiating the close-down procedures very soon and writing up our results.”

And the project, after that, gradually came to a close. Between taking care of baby John Albert at home and taking care of things with the project and following the government’s orders in shutting the whole thing down and writing up his results and then preparing the results for publication, Sam was in a state of perpetual exhaustion for the next six months.

One day, Al came into Sam’s office with a cup of coffee. “Here. I think you need this.”

Sam grabbed the cup and gulped it down. “Thank you, Al.”

“Believe me, I know how it is. I can’t believe my youngest is almost in high school now!”

“Does it get easier?” 

Al’s hesitation on this question made Sam even more nervous. “Well. With each of my girls, it was different. There are different challenges all the time too. You never did tell me what you saw happen in 2001.”

“You’ll know when it happens. Listen, Al, on September twelfth, 2001, you’re going to get a call. It’s not going to be about your friend in the Pentagon. They’re going to be asking for me. Ask for their number then call me with the number. That’s how you’ll know.”

“The Pentagon…? Okay, got it. Did you see anyone else in your future?”

“I saw John once, when he was older. He’s going to turn out to be a good kid, but it’s going to take time.” Sam rubbed at his eyes. 

Al looked up and shouted, “Ziggy, hit it up!” 

From the speakers, the song “Impossible Dreams” started playing. Sam smiled. “Man of La Mancha, huh?”

“Yeah. We played that while we were planning out this project, remember?”

“And now it’s coming to a close.”

“What’ll you be doing, Sam?”

“I told Donna I wanted to stay at home with John after this is all over, take a break. She can go back to work if she wants. I have enough in my investments from what I saved of my Nobel money, I think, to live off of for a while.”

“Beth and me, we’re staying here until Polly finishes high school. Then…” Al shrugged. “Beth wants to move back to California, but I told her we should buy an island in the Caribbean, move there. She reminded me we still had Polly’s college to pay for.”

“John won’t have anything to worry about. At least not for a while.”


	9. 2001

“Daddy! The tower is on fire!”

Sam jerked awake, then checked the clock. It was seven in the morning. “What’s going on, John?” Donna was starting to wake up as well.

“Look!” John tugged on Sam’s hand. Sam pulled on some pants then followed his three-year-old son downstairs.

On the TV, one of the World Trade Center towers was on fire. Sam remembered that a plane was going to crash into the second tower soon and hastily turned off the TV. “We don’t need to watch that, John. Who got you into a morning CNN habit, anyway? Come on, let’s get you some breakfast.”

John protested, “But there’s nobody else around when I wake up and you said not to wake you up so early anymore. Plus the news is interesting.”

Sam remembered what his mother had once remarked to him, a while ago, when Sam had told her about another of John’s latest antics. “Parents of smarter kids have more problems,” she had told him. “Remember that.”

Soon after, Donna came downstairs, dressed. “What’s going on?” she said. “Did John really say there was a tower on fire?”

“It was the World Trade Center. Don’t turn on the TV now- I don’t want John to see any more from this or hear any more, either. A plane crashed into one of the towers, and another plane crashed too, ten minutes ago.”

“How do you know…?”

“I was a firefighter there on a Leap. I saw the aftermath. I helped more people get out of the building.”

Donna glanced at John, then she said, “What should I do?”

“I’d wait to hear from your work. I don’t think the Air Force Academy is going to be doing anything today.”

Sure enough, the base was closed that day. Donna and Sam tried to play with John and keep him busy all day and away from the news on the TV, but Sam was distracted, thinking of the call that was coming for him from the Pentagon.

Which it did, at eight o’clock the next day. The first thing Sam heard when he picked up the phone was Al’s shaky voice. “Sam? I’m sorry for doubting you. You were right.”

“About what?”

“Over two years ago, you told me I was going to get a call on September twelfth and that it wasn’t related to my buddy in the Pentagon. You were right. Do you have a piece of paper there?”

“Yeah, I do.” Sam rummaged for one plus a pen. “What’s the number they want me to call?”

“Here it is…” Al rattled the digits of the number off in Alamogordo, New Mexico, while Sam wrote the number down, hundreds of miles away in Colorado Springs, Colorado. “I kept Polly home from school yesterday. I can’t believe it. Some of my friends who were in the Pentagon when the plane hit, they didn’t make it. Did you know that?”

“I know.” Sam stared at the piece of paper with the Pentagon number scribbled on it. “Aren’t you glad you turned down that post in DC?”

“If only for Polly’s sake,” Al sighed. “Listen, Sam, I’ll talk to you later. I told a friend I’d call him when I decided on something.”

“Talk to you later, Al.” The line beeped and Sam put down the phone. He put on a science DVD for John and sternly told his son, “Don’t you dare think about putting on CNN, you hear me? I have a call I need to make to some important people, so you can’t interrupt.”

John nodded with wide blue eyes and turned his attention to the TV.

In his office, with the door locked behind him, Sam dialed the number and asked for the man who had called Al. “Hello? Yes, this is Dr. Sam Beckett.”

“Dr. Beckett… this concerns Project Quantum Leap.”

“What about it? It was shut down over two and a half years ago. Your people dismantled everything.”

“This is also a matter of national security, Dr. Beckett. You noted in your results that you could change how history happened and Admiral Calavicci also provided his logs noting the changes from each time.”

So the Al from 2010 had been right. “Yes, I could affect how history happened, but it wasn’t an exact science.”

“Is there a way for you to direct yourself towards the events of yesterday? Ensure that they never happened? You see, if you are willing to do this, we’d fund your project for ten years and offer you state-of-the-art facilities. You could make this an exact science, Dr. Beckett.”

“I’m sorry, I can’t,” Sam told the man from the Pentagon. “In my journal article, Admiral Calavicci and I noted that this project wasn’t viable. No amount of effort is going to make it viable.”

There was a long pause on the other end of the line. Just as Sam thought the man had decided to hang up on him, he spoke again. “You also noted in your results that you were able to travel to both the past and the future. Has the future given you any insights on this event?”

Sam thought of the information he had read in 2020’s New York Public Library, which he still remembered. “Could I call a press conference?”

He arranged for Al to fly into Colorado Springs and help Donna with John while he was gone. A day later, on the flight to DC, Sam couldn’t stop thinking about his son. “Stop,” he told himself. “You’re doing this for him. You’re doing this for the world.”

After he arrived in Reagan, a group of Secret Service guards were there to escort Sam to the press conference.

They took him to what was left of the Pentagon. A group of reporters and cameras were already there. If only Al could speak for him instead! But Sam knew he had to do this.

In a suit, Sam, who was introduced as “Nobel-prize-winning physicist, Dr. Beckett, who successfully returned from a time travel experiment in 1998,” spoke to America. “As you know, I’ve had my results from Project Quantum Leap published in a physics journal,” he told everyone. “The results said that I traveled within my lifetime, both backwards to the past and forwards into the future. I understand that you all are very upset over what’s happened in New York City and Washington, DC. You may want to seek out the ones who did this, take action against them.”

There were murmurs from the crowd of reporters at this.

“I understand that. But now is not the time. The men behind this attack, from my understanding, are upset with the United States. We must not take action with them directly, for that would anger them further. Instead, we must seek diplomacy. And for a time, until it is safe, we will screen people based on their behavior and encourage everyone to take action. In the future, I saw an incident where a terrorist tried to blow up a plane with a hidden bomb, but the other people on the plane stopped him and tied him up with seatbelts until the plane landed and the terrorist could be escorted off.” Sam left out the part of the story about the bomb being hidden in the terrorist’s shoe, since he didn’t want to give people ideas and create a security panic related to shoes. “The game has changed now. People who hijack planes no longer want money or to go to a different destination. They intend to take lives now.”

A microphone was thrust into Sam’s face. “How do you suggest we stay safe, Dr. Beckett?”

“We need to follow Israel’s lead,” Sam said, remembering the infographic from the 2020 book. “Their airport is one of the safest in the world, even though they have many threats come in. They have many layers of security, and they take the time to train their security agents thoroughly, since those people are what’s keeping us from having another 9/11 happen again. All you need is people who are very well-trained in screening people for their behavior and metal detectors, and this will never happen again.”

Sam answered more questions from reporters, drawing on his photographic memory. Among the questions he answered were the terrorists’ reasonings behind the attacks. Sam again urged diplomacy when he answered this, saying that it was not just this group but also other groups from the Middle East who were similarly unhappy with various places. He told everyone, “We don’t need hate right now. We need cooperation.”

After some hours, the press conference came to a close and Secret Service once again escorted Sam to the limo that would take him back to Reagan and then home. 

Before he got in, however, the President stopped him. “Thank you for your service to your country, Dr. Beckett.”

“Not a problem, Mr. President,” Sam said. “Now if you please, I’d like to get back to my family.”

“Who do you have waiting at home for you?”

“My wife and our little boy.”

“Give them my regards.”

Sam waved then got into the limo.


	10. The Funeral... Again

The nation had followed Sam’s advice, thankfully. There were no long lines in airports like Sam remembered. The requirement that nobody go to the gates without a ticket was still in place and cockpits were still locked up tight and reinforced with steel against any threat of an attack. But now there were metal detectors in airports everywhere and agents who looked you in the eye when they chatted with you and didn’t need to pat you down. People were tense when they talked with immigrants, but that was one of the few changes in this post-2001 world.

Donna continued to work while Sam stayed at home with John. When John got into school, Sam took a post as a professor at a college in the area. As he told his students, he now only wanted to teach and help with research.

Now, twenty years after his wife had passed from cancer, it was Al’s turn. Sam was standing in Arlington near Al’s headstone, much older than he had been in the other timeline, nearly as old as Samuel.

But now his son John was standing next to him, a young man who had gotten to know both his father and godfather, a young man who was now following in his father’s footsteps by working on his third doctoral degree, this one in biology. Donna was standing on Sam’s other side.

There had been a procession down to Section 60, like last time. The cannons blasted thirteen times for Al’s rank. But now Sam stepped up to face the crowd of mourners, which included his family, Al’s, and the naval officers who had known Al. He made the eulogy:

“Albert Calavicci, as I knew him, was a good man. Sure, he didn’t always have the best of intentions and he wasn’t always the best of men… he would cheat at cards given the chance and look at other women when he thought his wife wasn’t looking. And he had his habits of cigars and fast cars. But he had an honored career in the Navy, over forty years, He won many medals over the course of his career, and he was in Vietnam for some time, as a prisoner of war. He also served NASA as an astronaut and me as his second-in-command at Project Quantum Leap. Al, I’m going to miss you very much.” Before he tossed in the dirt, Sam threw in a cigar on top of the casket.


End file.
